Other than the constant framerate issue I’ve been experiencing (where it inexplicably fluctuates between 7 and 26 fps), I’ve been absolutely glued to Champions for the past two days. In fact, my second-biggest problem is that I simply want to keep making alts, and have a hard time sticking with just one! (Although Yeti Yesterday, my force/tele champ, is loads of fun to play.)
Good news for my issue, however — Cryptic just posted on the performance issues some are having:
PLEASE NOTE that I am ONLY talking about graphics and client framerate performance issues here, other problems like server lag and crashes are also being worked on by others and I am not certain as to their current status.
First up for the performance issues is the extreme CPU usage happening especially while moving but also to some people while standing still. You can tell if this is the problem you are experiencing because changing your graphics setting all the way to low does not improve your FPS (which means that you are CPU bound and your GPU is just sitting idle most of the time). In extreme cases people are getting 1-5 FPS standing still. We have still been unable to reproduce this ourselves but thanks to the information many of you provided we think it was due to the background data loading thread getting into a bad state and constantly decompressing data. We have this fixed (unconfirmed until you guys test it), and the fix should be going up onto the public test shard soon and then it will get pushed to the live shard.
Another performance issue many have reported is the UI taking up 10-20 milliseconds per frame (note that we always do measurements in ms instead of FPS because FPS is non-linear; we display the milliseconds per frame next to the framerate in the /showfps display). Our UI guys are actively optimizing their code now, and they also found a situation where the chat window was taking up more and more time as it got full of text. The chat window bug has been fixed and should go up to the public test shard at the same time as the data loading fix.
The other problem that we are investigating is the just general “the game runs slower than it should on my awesome GPU” issue. Part of this is SLI and Crossfire support which we are working on, but we have to wait for NVIDIA and ATI to put up new drivers so they have the correct profiles for our game. For single GPU machines we are also working on general rendering performance improvements with the guys at NVIDIA helping us out by providing more information.
Bio Break 
I kinda like these guys.
Usually you get the “we are aware of the problem and are working hard to resolve the issue”. Here we can see they have identified the problem and are describing exactly how they are going about finding a solution.
If I wasn’t so disgraced by the a lot of the terrible-insta-eye-rusting costume designs I’ve seen floating around (yeah I know, I’m a design snob: what of it), I would maybe give this a shot. Good devs make good games. FACT.
And there is nothing more factor than fact.
The only reason I still follow EVE even though I don’t play it is ’cause CCP are good and more importantly, vocal people.
I’ve also heard reports that the game defaults to “window mode – maximized” and if you switch that to full screen it helps.
Woo, not got many graphics performance issues myself but this is good news for all as it should improve for all people 🙂
Just hoping the lag issues get fixed soon too so i can play primetime in the UK 🙂
I don’t experience any problems with my Nvidia 9700MGT but I’m glad they are working on a fix for people with issues.
When I log in it does say I don’t have the most current driver. I’m hesitant to try it and risk breaking what works well already.
Good to hear it is fun ! I still can’t play du to lag problem (watch forums, a lot of threads some with a LOT of pages…) !
I hope they’ll fix it quickly…
Anyway, how’s the leveling curve ?
What level have you got with your highest character ?
Is crafting really fun and useful (seems to be fun…from the little I could do) ?
Have you tried PvP ? Is there any PvP quests on the road to 40 ?
What powerset have you tried yet ?
For now, I started a gadget character…and tried teleport ! Not sure to love teleport for questing…maybe I should have done like I first though, getting rockets boots, then choose teleport at 35 as my second travel power…but teleport will be useful in PvP until 35…seems to be a lot of fun….besides the lag that makes it unplayable…really ! :S
Has anyone run across a “design service” for doing characters for Champions?
I’ve been watching the various costume designs, pictures posted here by Syp, and other pictures. With the Save and Load capability, it sure seems like someone could design a costume for a friend, email them the export image, and then let them upload and use the costume design.
Is that possible with the feature that Cryptic built into the designer tool?
This was one of my largest issues with CO, aside from the PvP taking forever and being a game of cat & mouse. Let us know how this turns out, it could be very good for Cryptic.
@ Feljin – Not a half-bad idea!
@Feljin : I would think so, they save costumes in the screenshot folder as I could see !
Meant “can see” and not could….
Well, I know that people like myself are not particularly good at design, so finding a way to let an expert help me out would be really helpful.
I wonder if it could work both ways? I take a shot at designing my hero, then pass the “screenshot” along to a friend who uploads it, tweaks it, and then send it back.
As I understand it, there is metadata embedded in that “screenshot” that should let it work.
Could be a really helpful service, I imagine.
@JiPi @Syp: I can confirm that created character designs are transportable between PCs and accounts. One of my guildmates used my PC during the Beta to create a character and we’ve copied that character to several PCs now.
We’re considering making a clone army. =)
@Feljin — Yes, what you suggest can work. You create your character costume and save it. go into you screenshots folder and grab the jpg of the character (the saves are in the form of a jpg). Pass it to a friend, who can load it, tweak it, save it (it’ll be a ‘new’ design), then send the jpg to you, at which point you stick this new jpg in your screenshot folder, start the character creator then LOAD that design.
My girlfriend’s only interest in CO is creating characters. I bought the Lifetime membership so we’d have plenty of slots to work with. that is, if I can ever stop playing!
This is awesome news!!
You can find a couple of character models here :
http://www.mmorpg.com/galleries
Champions should end up being a great title. It does require a good internet connection. I have played other online titles and had no problems (satalite internet). Champions is unplayable though. Just requires too much internet speed for me. I rolled the dice and bought the “lifetime” subscripition, sadly unusable. But if you can play it, have a good time. I think that it will be cool once the initial bugs are worked out. …..So anyone interested in a “lifetime” subscripition……still has that NEW GAME SMELL…..hardly used….low miles…..